New Fighting in Ukraine’s Language War

“I have no desire to become a soldier in this war of words,” Ukraine’s best-known novelist Andrei Kurkov wrote in 2012. He was reacting to the furor over a law instituted by former president Viktor Yanukovych that elevated Russian to the status of a regional language in Ukraine.

Kurkov writes mainly in Russian but was a supporter of the Maidan protests of 2013 that overthrow Yanukovych and turned Ukraine towards Europe. His was a plea to keep language politics out of the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv.

Unfortunately that plea is unheard and Ukraine’s language wars are restarting. A bill requiring 75 percent of national television broadcasts to be in Ukrainian has just been passed by the Rada. It follows a very unpopular move by President Poroshenko to ban Russian-language social media websites, such as Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki.

Next up for discussion is draft legislation that seeks to ensure “the functioning and use of Ukrainian as a state language in all spheres of public life in the whole territory of Ukraine.”

At first glance, this may look uncontroversial. Of course, the Ukrainian language, which spent decades as the poor cousin of Russian in its own country, needs to be promoted and supported. But there is a lot of devil in the detail in terms of how this should happen. Many Ukrainian citizens who are not necessarily devotees of Vladimir Putin or the Russian state and regard themselves as Ukrainian patriots are still bilingual or prefer Russian to Ukrainian. These people will regard any attempt to make them give up speaking their native language as an attack on their fundamental rights.

The draft law on the state language, if passed, would explicitly draw new battle lines in Ukraine on the basis of nationality. Article 8 contains the rather disturbing formulation of “citizens of Ukraine whose ethnic origin is not Ukrainian.” Article 51 proposes the somewhat sinister institution of a “control commission” whose “language inspectors” would monitor whether Ukrainian was being used in public offices, school classrooms, and university lecture halls and would see those who were caught using Russian punished by law.

Two of the law’s main initiators—parliamentarians who have progressive profiles on a number of other issues, Oksana Servit of the Samopomich group and Hanna Hopko, who is chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee—have said that widespread usage of the Russian language undermines Ukrainian statehood. Another member of parliament, Ivan Krulko from the Batkivshchyna faction, has argued that “it is necessary for the development of the country, which should break away from Russia.”

But maybe the opposite is true. Currently, many Ukrainian teachers and professors switch back and forth from Ukrainian to Russian, depending on the language preferences of their students or the requests of parents. It is an open secret in Kyiv that the city has very few formal Russian-language schools but many classes are conducted in Russian when parents ask for it informally.

This informal bilingualism, where Ukrainian remains the formal language of the state but Russian gets used on an ad hoc basis, has facilitated a clear trend whereby Ukrainian is becoming more and more the default language of the country. A poll conducted in May 2015 showed that almost 60 percent of the population prefer to speak Ukrainian as their language of everyday communication, a much higher number than two decades ago.

If the truce in the language war is now over, Moscow is certainly ready to restart its side of the conflict. Any moves to formally discriminate against Russian language use gets such wide coverage in Russia that it verges on the hysterical. In February 2014, a brief attempt by the Rada to repeal the Yanukovych-era language law helped provide cover for the Russian narrative for the annexation of Crimea shortly afterwards. With characteristic hyperbole, one Russian parliamentarian, Frants Klintsevich, called the new draft bill a case of “linguistic genocide.”

When I visited Kyiv and Odessa in early May, most people who I sounded out about the new draft law responded with weary black humor. The most common sentiment was that Ukrainian politicians resort to language battles to mobilize their core supporters and to disguise their lack of policies on the issues that really concern the public, like corruption and economic inequality.

One university lecturer, who is paid 150 euros a month, told me she manages to make the current arrangements work, switching back and forth between Ukrainian and Russian to accommodate the wishes and knowledge of her students. But she said that if “language inspectors” were ever instituted, her professional life would become needlessly much harder and she would have less time for the real educational challenges she faces. “Give us a normal salary and we will teach in Chinese!” she said.

The Author is totally mistaken on draft law on Ukrainian language as a state language as it regulates the use Ukrainian by state authorities, in education, media and not regulates the use of language in private life.

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@odlilith

May 30, 20171:48 am

The author doesn't seem to have any historical knowledge of how the Russian language was forced upon the Ukrainians by the Soviet occupiers. Cities like Kherson and Odesa were Russified but when you look at the surrounding towns and villages they are all Ukrainian. How would let's say the Dutch feel if they still had to speak German in their big cities after the German occupation?

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avery

May 30, 20172:30 am

1. "Ukrainian language, which spent decades as the poor cousin of Russian in its own country" - according to whom? Please check your sources, otherwise you will be called a liar.
2. What about Hungarians, Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians who live in Ukraine? Territories where they live belonged to their respective countries, not to Ukraine. So they should be forced to become Ukrainians?
What a BS

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Lev Havryliv

May 30, 201712:49 pm

For over 350 years Russian colonial rulers of Ukraine did their utmost to ban and suppress the Ukrainian language in an effort to destroy Ukrainian culture and national identity.
Ukraine still suffers from the legacy of these policies and it is a matter of restoration of an historical injustice that the Ukrainian language takes its rightful place in today's Ukraine.

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Fred

May 31, 20171:53 am

I guess that if both Ukraine and Russia respect the Minsk agreements, this new language policy would also apply to the Donbass when it is back under Kiev government. You don't need to know much about Ukraine to understand that this is a clear provocation and that many people in Ukraine will fight against this, with or without the help of Russia. In a certain sense this evolution just confirms what Russia has been saying all the time: Maidan wasn't mainly against the corruption, but it was part of a broad geopolicital game in which the EU tries to westernize Ukraine. Part of this is to suppress and to marginalize Russian and Russian speakers, considered immigrants, as we have seen in the Baltic states. No doubt this will lead to an open war in Ukraine.

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C Makhno

May 31, 20177:13 am

In fact, in Russia and in the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages are completely suppressed and those who speak them in public are persecuted by the government and sometimes physically assaulted (or even killed).
It is Russia that has for centuries followed a policy of 'linguistic genocide' of minority groups.
Too bad the article has no mention of this.

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KyivBlues

June 03, 20178:35 pm

This article purposely misleads the reader in thinking that the banning of websites under Russian intelligence agencies control is part of a language policy. There is not one European or North American country that would allow for a social site that has been seized by the Russian State to control 60% of their country's social media.

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Nona Shahnazarian

June 08, 20176:31 am

Was interesting to read this article. That's an interesting idea to reflect on deeper - new political elite seeks for legitimization. Just because they have no agenda and clear program on what needs to be done and in which order, they use linguistic schauvinism as a unifying banner. Nothing is new - the same things happened when Armenians refugees from Azerbaijan arrived to Armenia and Karabakh. They were mercilessly blamed and marginalized in public sphere for their Russian, but apparently it was a way to block a "new competition". This is how in new social context local elites stayed in power being profecionally less advanced than newcomers. It is interesting to draw parallels, isn't it? Thank you for your thoughts, Thomas.

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